Merry __mas

PRAY, tell, where was the Christ last Christmas?
I did not see Him in the frenzied shopping rush causing all those monstrous traffic jams around the malls. All I saw was compulsive consumption, offered as it were at capitalism’s unholy shrines.
I did not hear Him in the cacophony of sounds – from the consumer noise to the piped-in carols – at SM or Robinsons, Nepo or even Saver’s Mall. All I heard above the din was the tinkling of cash registers, sweet, sweet music to Sy and Gokongwei’s long, long ears.
Commercialization has taken over religion. An even more apt assertion: Commercialization is the new religion. People are more zealous in going to the shopping malls than to churches.
And then, witness how one American fast-food chain capitalized on the pure-Filipino tradition of the nine-day dawn Masses to impact its commercial presence: Si_bang Gabi incomplete without the M, in the form of the logo of the food franchise. It is not only that burgers have taken over bibingka and puto-bumbong as after-Mass delicacies. The burger joints have taken precedence over the churches themselves.
Pasintabi po lamang, Mang Oca but the Christ was nowhere too – with all that pushing, shoving and foot-stomping – at the Giant Lantern Festival sites. The Christmas Star there reduced to a mere, albeit grand, spectacle of light from its sublime symbolism of love – the greatest manifestation of love that is the birth of the Christ.
Pray, tell, who still know the meaning of the Christmas lantern?
I remember my high school theology professor – the then-Rev. Fr. Paciano B. Aniceto – lecturing that the Christmas lantern took after the Star of Bethlehem that pointed to where the Christ was born and thereby guided both lowly shepherds and majestic magi to the manger. Hence – the good Apu Ceto explained – wherever the Christmas lantern is hoisted, posted or hung, there the Christ is, there His love is. The lantern being the Star’s representation.
Thus, of all the symbols of Christmas – from mistletoes and Christmas trees to Santa Claus and the snowman – it is the lantern that has the greatest, if not the only, theological value. Are we even remotely aware of this?
Star-struck we all are: always finding celebrities but never the Christ in all those stars. Which this Christmastime also came down from the celluloid firmament to regale us with that escapist farce that was the Metro Manila Film Festival. Ah, were the faithful as religiously devoted to Christ as to Zsa-Zsa, Pops and Juday...
So I grant that it was SRO, standing-room-only dummy, at the churches the eve of Christmas Day, the worshipers even spilling out to the churchyards.
Did they come to welcome their Savior? Or to show off their new clothes, to meet and joke with friends, to unleash their unruly children, to be and do just about everything but to worship?
And so it was during consecration that the loud clop-clop of some boys’ new pairs of shoes and the shrieks of little girls running by the very altar heralded the transformation of the wafer into the very body of Christ and the wine into His very blood.
Joy to the world, what lord has come?

Dong does it

THE picture says it all – an ecstatic Board Member Dong Gonzales, hands raised in triumph by Senator Lito Lapid and Governor Mark T. Lapid, with nearly half the provincial board – Tars Halili, Nelson Calara, Pinong Laus, JQ Quiambao and Pros Lagman – beaming their approval, plus vice gubernatorial wannabe Concon Laus and broadcaster Perry Pangan thumbing up the scene.
Duh, you’re a dummy if you still wonder who the Lakas-CMD official bet will be for the third congressional district. Again, the picture says it all. The Lapid imprimatur is indeed worth every penny of the million dollar smile on Dong’s face.
Given the closeness – okay, the rabid loyalty – of the Lapids to the President, it is safer than safe to assume now that Dong indeed has been conveyed the blessing of GMA.
With that all those nasty innuendoes and direct indictment of Dong as a Trojan horse of the opposition fall flat on their valueless faces. So who’s caught with his pants down?
Dong has apparently mastered the power of the photograph to counter the propaganda tack that he is anti-GMA. Barely a week or so before the photo of his first-hurrah-with-the-Lapids came out in this paper, another paper – Sun-Star Pampanga , I think – splashed on its front page a beaming Dong in a buddy-buddy pose with presidential son Congressman Mikey Macapagal Arroyo himself.
Commented a coffee-mate at Old Manila in SM Pampanga: “Mikaluguran la pala i Dong ampo i Mikey. E tutu itang sasabyan dang laban ya keng administrasyun i Dong.” (Dong and Mikey are friends. All those rumors that Dong is anti-administration are false.)
Quipped another: “Pamanyira mu kang Dong deng kalaban na ita. E de kasi agyu. Sobra ya yumu karing tau king tersera distritu.” (Dong’s rivals are scheming against him because they cannot beat him (in the polls). He is immensely popular in the third district.)
Whither thou goeth now, Dinan Piñon Labung?
After blazing a comeback trail with heaps of press releases, public consultations and streamers purporting support from just about every sector except the magmamani and the manikurista , there is nary a word heard of Dinan.
Why, he has even been dislodged as streamer king by Cong Ely ‘Tiger’ Lagman with his innovatively original – ha, ha, ha, ha – “I love 3rd District.”
The TL moniker – true love? true leadership? tulog lagi? -- is getting more buzz than Dinan Progreso at Labung ing Tersera Distrito whenever talks shift to politics in just about every gathering.
For Dinan to regain his toehold of just even a weenie part of the district, he has to review his strategies, as well as his strategists.
A fresh mindset is essential to Dinan and his team. That is if they want to go past their current publicly-perceived image as mere congressional pretender rather than a serious contender.
Even better, to pull the rug under Dong’s feet, all Dinan has to do is get a photo of himself with no less than GMA raising his hand.
A war of pictures then? No. A war of the Lapids and the Macapagals will be more likely.

Philhealth disservice

THE Philippine Health Insurance Corp. is the best thing to have happened to the hospitalized: poor or not, needing all the discounts from the usually hefty medical bills and even heftier doctors’ fees.
The Philippine Health Insurance Corp. – its region 3 office at least – is the worst thing to have happened to a Philhealth card holder transacting business – to this writer at least.
Wednesday last week, the wife underwent D&C procedure – raspa for those unfamiliar with medical jargon – at the San Fernandino Hospital. As she would only stay overnight, the dutiful husband prepared all the papers required for her discharge in the morrow.
It was a learning process for the uninitiated me. The hospital’s Philhealth coordinator was all help. My presumption that the wife made an automatic dependent and need not be listed as one in my member data record (MDR) was all wrong. So what was I to do?
“Just attach your marriage contract” was the simple solution. Of course I had to attach too – to the bill of medical particulars – my last receipt of payment to Philhealth and my MDR.
So, early Thursday morning soon as the hospital billing office opened, I was first in line, dreading to miss the noontime cut and thereby adding one more day to my bill. There I was told I had to get a new MDR with the wife listed as dependent. So off I rushed to Philhealth.
Lucky me there was no one else before the table marked “Individually Paying/Self-Employed Members.” A grim face better suited to a funeral parlor than to a government service agency told me the xeroxed copy of our marriage contract would not do.
I said I could show her our original marriage contract which I brought with me for the eventuality that just happened.
Still no can do. Philhealth, she said, would only recognize a certified true copy of the original. This is one rare – and outrightly stupid – instance when a copy is given more weight than an original.
It would not take a carbon dater to determine the authenticity of our marriage certificate yellowed with age, frayed along the edges, and still bearing government stamps and the seal of that city judge in Iloilo City where we contracted our vows thirty years ago. Anyone with an IQ a notch above an idiot would know. Miss Philhealth would not.
So what was I to do? “Go to the National Statistics Office and get your certified true copy.”
But I was taking the wife out that morning. And the lines at the NSO purportedly took all day to process. Lady Morticia could not care less.
Phoning the wife of my predicament, she informed me that we had an NSO- authenticated copy kept among the kids’ birth certificates.
Soon as I got it, I rushed back to Philhealth. No one was seated at the table for individually paying members. I asked the guy at the next table where the sitter was.
“May ginagawa po” was the answer.
Scanning around, I saw Morticia chatting idly with two others of her kind around another employee’s table. After a full 10 minutes, she went back to her table to “serve” a couple with a young child. Soon after she disposed of them with a “Fill these forms then come back,” she hurried to what looked like a storeroom at the far side of that office.
It took her close to another 10 minutes to return. This time she seated herself by the table marked “Government Employees” or some such.
“Diyan ba kayo o dito?“ I asked pointing at the other table.
“Kahit saan” was her answer, her face enough to put all the sourness needed in a pot of paksiw.
So I gave her the NSO-certified true copy of our marriage contract.
“Pa-xerox mo,” she gave it back to me and shoved two forms for me to fill up.
So I got what I wanted. But should it be through such a tedious process?
My experience made a travesty of the standard of government service the Civil Service Commission set: Mamamayan Muna, Hindi Mamaya Na.
Frontliners in the government service should have human sensitivity and humane sensibility in dealing with their publics.
Philhealth bossman Tito Mendiola I have known since his OIC-Mayor days in Floridablanca as a committed public servant. He does not deserve a staffer like Morticia Addams. She is a great disservice to an institution that has service as its very reason for being.
(Access previous columns at acaesar.blogspot.com)

Governor Baby Pineda

AT the rate things are going in the political scene here, Board Member Lilia Pineda – Pampanga’s favorite Baby – may yet emerge the most formidable candidate for the Pampanga governorship in 2007.
And Governor Mark Tadeo Lapid would have no one to look – and blame? – but himself for this.
More than the mayors, it was the Pineda couple – the Bong and the Baby – that Mark rebuffed with his public rejection of their son Mayor Dennis as his running-mate.
“The Pinedas were not only slighted by the governor’s act, they were insulted. They felt scorned,” said one mayor who was not Candaba’s Jerry Pelayo.
So grievous was the perceived insolence of Lapid – said another mayor who had no resemblance to Bacolor’s Buddy Dungca – that the Pinedas would now settle for nothing less than the governor’s downfall.
“It does not take a rocket scientist to see where realpolitik lies in Pampanga. It is not in Porac, notwithstanding the senator and his son. It is in Lubao,” so averred yet one more mayor who looked the least like Apalit’s Tirso Lacanilao.
To prove his point, the mayor cited the 2004 gubernatorial contest as a “sure Zeny Ducut romp before the great turn-around of the Pinedas that paved the way to a Lapid victory.”
And absolutely no mayor dared contest the affirmation of “a truth so trite as long ago to have become a truism” in local politics: the Pinedas can make crowned kings out of even the weakest pretenders to the throne.
For all his vaunted popularity, the upstart Lito Lapid still needed the organizational and financial back-up of the Pinedas to secure his victory in 1995. So remembered a former mayor who could be mistaken for Sta. Rita’s Frank Ocampo.
Alas, Porac’s Roy David could not be sought out from the spirit world to verify this.
Still, there is no iota of doubt about it: the Pinedas are the most potent political force in Pampanga. And there lies the problem of Lapid’s re-election.
By herself alone, Baby Pineda – I repeat – is a most formidable candidate. Doubly formidable is she with the unquestioned support of – I personally reckon – a dozen sitting mayors, and even a greater number of former mayors.
You want a head count? See the photo of those being sworn in as Kampi members in last week’s issue’s front page, minus the three who appeared with Lapid in the other photo.
Secure in the Pineda stable, aside from Pelayo, Lacanilao and Dungca, are: Sta. Rita’s Art Salalila, Sasmuan’s Lina Bagasina, Floridablanca’s Darwin Manalansan, Guagua’s Ric Rivera, Magalang’s Pat Guiao, Sta. Ana’s Doy Gaddi, and San Luis’ Jay Sagum.
As his tormentor Ernesto Punzalan is a permanent fixture in the Lapid camp, it is safe to assume that Mexico’s Teddy Tumang is going Pineda too.
Yet another network the Pinedas have easy access to is that of clergymen and pastors. Anyone who has had some inputs in Politics 101 would know the influence wielded by the religious on the masa vote.
The Pinedas have the numbers. Undubitably. How about the issues?
There, the Lapids will be hard pressed too. All the Pinedas have to do is tap Vice Governor Yeng Guiao. A recitation by Guiao of the litany of sins the Lapids allegedly committed against the Kapampangans is an invitation to their damnation.
So the Baby is sure ball for governor? Politics being a sport, there’s no sure thing until the last shot is made, or missed. Llamado she definitely is, but bilog pa rin ang bola.
Then, will she run?